Preempting Dissent

Preempting Dissent

Preempting Dissent: A Collaborative, Open Source Documentary on thePolitics of Suppressing Dissentwith Dr. Greg Elmer, Professor of Media, Communication & Culture
Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media, Ryerson University

The creative commons documentary Preempting Dissent (2014) builds upon the book of the same name written by Greg Elmer and Andy Opel. The film is a culmination of a collaborative process of soliciting, collecting and editing video, still images, and creative commons music files from people around the world. Preempting Dissent interrogates the expansion of the so-called “Miami-Model” of protest policing, a set of strategies developed in the wake of 9/11 to preempt forms of mass protest at major events in the US and worldwide. The film tracks the development of the Miami model after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, through the post-9/11 years, FTAA & G8/20 summits, and most recently the Occupy Wall Street movements. The film exposes the political, social, and economic roots of preemptive forms of protest policing and their manifestations in spatial tactics, the deployment of so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and surveillance regimes. The film notes, however, that new social movements have themselves begun to adopt preemptive tactics so as not to fall into the trap set for them by police agencies worldwide.

Presented by Art + Design and Media and Screen Studies in collaboration with the Northeastern Center for the Arts.

Hosted by Alessandra Renzi, Assistant Professor in Emergent Media for the Department of Art + Design and for the Program in Media and Screen Studies .